Dead Water (29 page)

thirty-two

“I fish because I love to; because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful … and, finally not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally important—and not nearly so much fun. ”

Robert Traver

They
left the main road another half-mile farther down. “I know a back way that’ll cut five minutes off the trip,” said Ray. He pulled into a rutted lane used by hunters. The road twisted down through a stand of aspen and balsam. A wide meadow rolled out ahead of them, the young grass tall and green and glinting with the yellows, reds, and whites of spring wildflowers. On a distant rise, a buffalo ambled into view. They were within sight of the preserve.

Leaving the rutted lane, Ray’s truck bounced across the meadow, dipped down through another stand of balsam, and chugged along a berm piled with boulders. The berm ended in a clearing. Ray slowed the truck. From there they could see the rooftops of the Wildwood Game Preserve office, Hank’s home, and the outbuildings.

Less than a minute later, they were headed up a well-worn dirt road that ran behind the barns. “May as well park here as anywhere,” said Ray, steering toward a grassy area between two livestock pens. “Last time I drove by, they had half a dozen trailers parked out front.”

Suddenly he slammed on the brakes.

“What the—?” Osborne braced his hands against the dash.

“Over there,” said Ray. “The boys, I see ‘em—they’re in the woods.”

Turning off the ignition, Ray jumped from the truck just as Osborne spotted Nick and Zenner crouched in a thicket of tag alder. Osborne, forgetting the door on his side was hopelessly locked shut, jimmied the handle in frustration. He finally slid across the seat to get out on Ray’s side, banging his kneecap on the shift lever as he went. “Goddamnit!”

“What are you two doing out here?” he heard Ray say. The boys stood up and walked out from behind the thicket.

“We, um, had to leave,” said Nick. “Mr. Kendrickson got pretty angry at Zenner.”

“Yeah, he kinda lost it,” said Zenner, looking up through his dark eyelashes, his face rounder and sadder than ever. “But it’ll be okay. He always calms down.”

“So why are you hiding?” asked Osborne, rubbing his knee.

“He told us to leave,” said Nick. “But we waited here. We still got all our stuff inside, and I knew you guys were coming. We were gonna wait for you out in front, but Zenner thought you might come this way, so we hid back here. We didn’t want Mr. Kendrickson to see us.”

The expression of relief on Nick’s face was so palpable, Osborne sensed he had been worried they weren’t coming. In spite of his obvious relief, the boy still looked frightened.

“Where’s Kendrickson right now?” asked Ray, walking off. Something had caught his eye, drawing him toward a cluster of white pine whose branches hung protectively over a deer feeder. “Nick, take care of that matter we discussed?” he said nonchalantly, throwing Nick a quick look. The boy gave a barely perceptible shake of his head: apparently not.

“He went somewhere in the Rover after we took off,” said Zenner.

“So tell me again what he’s so mad about?” asked Ray, kicking at something on the ground.

“I don’t think I should talk about it,” said Zenner. “It’s his problem, not ours.” Osborne was watching Zenner as he talked. The froggy lids had closed halfway over the kid’s myopic eyes. If ever someone looked like they wanted to drop the subject …

“Oh no, bud, it’s
your
problem.” Ray’s tone sharpened even as he knelt to examine something in the sand and needles under the pine trees. “I’ll give you a choice. You can talk to us or you can talk to Chief Ferris. But if it’s the chief you want, then you’ll need to have your old man with you … and the family lawyer.”

“What do you mean?” The heavy lids fluttered, and the color drained from the boy’s face.

Ray stood and walked back to where Osborne and the boys were standing. “Don’t even ask. Just talk, and talk now.” The steel tone was so unlike Ray, even Osborne was taken aback.

“Better tell him, Zenner,” said Nick softly.

“Okay, okay. I screwed up. Not being here yesterday afternoon, he lost six million dollars in the stock market ‘cause of me.”

“What?!” Osborne and Ray exclaimed simultaneously.

“I didn’t do it on purpose; I thought he wasn’t coming back,” said Zenner. “Nick and me, we waited over half an hour—”

“No, no, back up. How the hell can
you
possibly cause him to lose that kind of money?” asked Ray.

“He’s got this investment software that I run for him in the afternoons,” said Zenner. “He gives me different letter codes and has me do percentages off the numbers that come up. He always does it at the same time, but he doesn’t do it every day. So how was I to know he had to have it done yesterday?”

“What time of day is it that he has you do this?” asked Osborne.

“Oh, around three, three-thirty … Sometimes it’s a little earlier, but then he gets real nervous.”

Osborne looked at Ray. “He’s got Zenner doing the trades for him at the market close.”

“I found blood on those trees over there,” said Ray, raising his eyebrows in a question.

“That’s Mr. Kendrickson,” said Zenner. “He’s got three deer feeders and he likes to practice shooting out his office window. See that one way back? He’s really good, too. He can take a deer down at that far one with one bullet. He shot a buck last week. It went twenty feet and dropped. Boom. Nailed him in the heart.”

“So he’s poaching out of season?” said Osborne.

“I don’t think so,” said Zenner. “I think because it’s a game preserve, he can do that any time. That’s what he told me anyway.”

“What about your guns? You do a little shooting, too?” Ray stood with his arms crossed, legs apart, and his feet planted.

“My guns?” Zenner looked confused. “I don’t have any guns out here.”

“Where are they?”

“I’ve got the twelve-gauge my dad gave me and it’s in my dad’s gun rack at home. Why?”

“That’s all you got?”

“Yeah. Why?” the boy asked again.

Ray looked at him in silence. “Okay, kid, tell us about the teeth marks on Nick’s shoulders. What the hell is that all about?”

“Oh …” The lids fluttered again. He glanced over at Nick. “You told ‘em, huh?” Zenner’s face changed; the expression grew sullen. For the first time, Osborne caught a glimpse of a hard anger lurking behind the boy’s goofy frogginess, a dark and serious center.

“No, I didn’t,” said Nick. “Dr. Osborne saw them on me when I was sleeping last night. I tried to tell ‘em they’re just tattoos—”

“He said it’s your way of keeping the jocks out of your face. Is that a good way to put it?” asked Ray.

“I s’pose.”

“Do you hate those guys? The jocks?”

“I don’t
hate
‘em. I just don’t want to have to deal with them.”

“So this is how you deal with them? Forgive me, guy, but I don’t get it.”

“I try to scare ‘em, okay? It may sound dumb to you but it works.”

Nick nodded. “Yeah, he doesn’t hurt anybody….”

Encouraged, Zenner’s face brightened. “I do stuff to keep ‘em guessing, like … well, for one thing, I make sure they know that I know more than they do about computers. Anything to do with computers gets respect. And weird. Weird gets respect. Not pathetic weird, Stephen King weird. You can think it’s stupid if you wanna, but this is what I figured out. Vampires were big where we used to live, so I made a thing about it when I moved here. Now I kinda have my own group of friends and we do the vampire-Goth thing—”

“Goth? What’s Goth?” asked Ray.

“Gothic stuff, like you wear a lot of black.”

“They aren’t really vampires,” volunteered Nick.

“Right,” said Zenner. “It’s like a
concept
, y’know? Lotsa kids do it.”

“Did
it,” said Nick. “East Coast doesn’t do it anymore. Where I go to school, it’s like five-years-ago shit.”

Ray threw him a cautionary look. This was not the time for Nick to show he was cool.

“And the teeth marks?”

“That’s our logo. I got these old casts left over from Dad’s office. You know those plaster full-mouth models they use to make dentures? We dip ‘em in Chinese red ink and press down—they leave marks like you really bit someone. But they’re just tattoos, you don’t feel it really. Not like anyone gets hurt.”

“But someone did get hurt, Zenner.” Osborne stepped forward. “The two women who’ve been murdered. They have those bite marks on their bodies, on their shoulders. Just like Nick’s. The same casts used on Nick were used on the victims. How do you explain that?”

Zenner just stared at him, his mouth open. “You … you think I …”

“What would you think?” said Osborne.

“And you’ve purchased over twenty guns in recent months. What’s that all about?” said Ray.

“I have?” The boy was stunned, his eyes wide open and locked on Ray’s. Osborne did not doubt him for an instant.

thirty-three

“Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after.”

Henry David Thoreau

As
they walked around the old barn that had been converted into the Wildwood Game Preserve’s main office building, Ray hung back with Osborne. He spoke in a low tone so the boys couldn’t hear. “I think the chief may want to get Wausau out here fast. I’ve gutted plenty of deer in my life, enough to know that what I saw under those trees should be analyzed. Could be human—decomposing hair and tissue. I could be wrong, too. I’ll find a shovel and scoop some up before the eagles finish it off.”

“I want these boys out of here,” said Osborne. “If Kendrickson is who we think he is, we can’t put these kids at risk.”

“I’m with you, Doc,” said Ray. “Once they point us in the right direction, I’ll tell ‘em to take my truck—”

“That’s the door to Mr. Kendrickson’s office,” said Zenner, pointing off to the left. “He always locks it when he leaves. The door on the right is mine. He’s real paranoid, too. He had the windows and that door put in so he can see everyone coming and going.” Osborne noticed that even though it was a sunny, lovely day and the blinds were open, the windows were shut tight.

“Is there a connecting door between the two offices?” asked Osborne.

“No. He doesn’t let me in there, either.”

Ray walked over to the door. He turned the knob. “Yep, locked.” He looked at Zenner. “So there’s no other way in, huh? Do I have to bust the lock or break a window?”

Zenner paused for a split second. “I found a way in. It isn’t easy, but I snooped around and he never knew. I’ll show you.”

They entered the office right next door. “So this is my space,” said Zenner. The windows to this room were flung wide open. Along the back wall of the small, squarish room were two worktables, cobbled together from sawhorses and unfinished doors. On each rested a computer surrounded by haphazard piles of papers, handbooks, and other junk. Other gear had been shoved under the tables with tangles of cords running to printers and CD-ROM columns. In the far right corner was a third workstation, a larger monitor resting on a beat-up old oak desk. Empty soda cans, paper cups, and McDonald’s lunch bags overflowed from two wastebaskets just inside the entrance. The floor was a mess of muddy footprints, sand, and pine needles.

Zenner walked over to the old desk and pulled open the bottom drawer. Sitting there, beside an inkpad, were half a dozen plaster casts, full sets of human teeth, the edges of the teeth stained blood red.

“I keep ‘em here,” said Zenner. “I didn’t want my mom to find them in my bedroom….”

“So someone—anyone—could find these if you weren’t here?” said Osborne.

“I guess so, but Mr. Kendrickson never touches my stuff,” said Zenner. “He doesn’t come in here very often. We’re networked so he can pull up what I’m doing on his own screen.”

“Did you ever talk to him about your friends and their habits?” asked Ray.

“Ray,” Osborne interrupted, “let’s hurry this along. I want these boys out of here.”

Zenner thought over Ray’s question. “Yes,” he said, “when I first started here last fall, Mr. Kendrickson was really, really friendly. He’d come in and we’d talk about stuff. I had some vampire computer games around for a while. So, yeah, he knew about my friends and that stuff.”

“He didn’t think you were crazy?” asked Ray.

“I always talked about it like it was fun and funny, not like it was real serious stuff,” said Zenner. “It didn’t seem to bother him. After a while, though, I thought it was a little weird how much he wanted to know. Got kinda spooky. I didn’t tell him too much after that.

“Even so, Mr. Kendrickson has always been pretty good to me. But I’ll tell you one thing. He’s been awful tense lately. And the way he got so mad today, that is real strange.”

“Zenner, do you carry a wallet?” asked Osborne.

“Sure. Why?”

“Did you ever leave it lying around here?”

“All the time. Dad gets pretty mad at me, too. He doesn’t want me driving without my license on me.” Zenner gave him a questioning look. “But I forget it because I hate to sit with it in my pocket when I’m working. My butt gets sore.” Osborne could see why. The chairs in the office were old, with wooden seats.

“So you’ve left it here a lot?”

“I try not to, but yeah. I leave it by my computer at home, too,”

“Ah,” said Ray. He seemed to be easing up on the kid. “Okay, okay,” he said, seeing the harried look on Osborne’s face. “Show us Kendrickson’s office. We want you guys out of here before your boss gets back.”

Zenner walked over to a door in the wall dividing the two offices. It opened to a closet filled with cleaning supplies. Unlike Zenner’s workspace, the closet did not have a finished ceiling. Instead, the interior was exposed to the roof beams. Brooms, a mop, and two stepladders, one stool-size and one standard height, were jammed in beside a wall-hung utility sink and a dirty toilet. A can of cleanser, a full bottle of floor detergent, and a half-used roll of paper towels were in a cardboard box under the sink. A pack of twelve rolls of single-ply toilet tissue leaned against a shower curtain that had been rigged to one side of the closet.